His remains were treated with honors never before paid to a subject. He lay in state; he had a public funeral. His body was laid in the great Church of St. Geneviève, which, the very day before, had been renamed the Pantheon, and appropriated as a cemetery for such of her illustrious sons as France might hereafter think worthy of the national gratitude. Yet, though his great confidant and panegyrist, M. Dumont,[5] has devoted an elaborate argument to prove that he had not overestimated his power to influence the future; and though the Russian embassador, M. Simolin, a diplomatist of extreme acuteness, seems to imply the same opinion by his pithy saying that "he ought to have lived two years longer, or died two years earlier," we can hardly agree with them. La Marck, as has been seen, even when first opening the negotiation for his connection with the court, doubted whether he would be able to undo the mischief which he had acquiesced in, measures not of reform nor of reconstruction, but of total abolition and destruction, are in their very nature irrevocable and irremediable. The nobility was gone; he had not resisted its suppression. The Church was gone; he had himself been among the foremost of its assailants. How, even if he had wished it, could he have undone these acts? and if he could not, how, without those indispensable pillars and supports, could any monarchy endure? That he was now fully alive to the magnitude of the dangers which encompassed both throne and people, and that he would have labored vigorously to avert them, we may do him the justice to believe. But it seems not so probable that he would have succeeded, as that he would have added one more to the list of these politicians who, having allowed their own selfish aims to carry them beyond the limits of prudence and justice, have afterward found it impossible to retrace their steps, but have learned to their shame and sorrow that their rashness has but led to the disappointment of their hopes, the permanent downfall of their own reputations, and the ruin of what they would gladly have defended and preserved. And, on the whole, it is well that from time to time such lessons should be impressed upon the world. It is well that men of lofty genius and pure patriotism should learn, equally with the most shallow empiric or the most self-seeking demagogue, that false steps in politics can rarely be retraced; that concessions once made can seldom, if ever, be recalled, but are usually the stepping-stones to others still more extensive; that what it would have been easy to preserve, it is commonly impossible to repair or to restore.